1. Field
The present inventive concept generally relates to providing a user terminal device for supporting a data share function of sharing data between applications and methods thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
The recent development of electronic technologies has brought the development and distribution of various types of user terminal devices. In particular, user terminal devices that use various types of applications, such as a portable phone, a tablet PC, etc., have increasingly been used.
User terminal devices provide services to users by using various types of hardware and software. An operation of such a user terminal device is driven by an operating system (OS) that is installed in the user terminal device.
The OS is system software that provides a hardware abstracting platform and a common system service to manage system hardware and execute application software. Windows that have been made by Microsoft is a representative OS. Windows 8, the latest version of the OS, has been recently developed.
Differently in a desktop environment, in a Windows 8 store app environment, i.e., a metro environment, a direct data transmission between different applications is impossible. Therefore, Windows 8 supports a share function to share data between applications. Here, an application that provides data is referred to as a source application, and an application that is provided with data is referred to as a target application. A share broker mediates between applications.
However, an existing source application stores each of several images in a file format and transmits a stored file to a target application in order to provide the several images to the target application. Therefore, the source application necessarily performs a process of storing data in a storage, and the target application necessarily performs a process of loading data. Since a file Input/Output (I/O) operation is performed two times as described above, a data share between applications takes a large amount of time. In particular, if several images are to be shared, the above-mentioned problem grows more serious.
Therefore, there is a need for methods of efficiently sharing data between a plurality of different applications.